Big Bang Ricochet - WW2 Collection: Ko Gata Sensha

In the beginning, Japan had to buy foreign tanks to build an armor force because the nation did not have the industrial capacity or technical skill to manufacture its own. There was a single British Mk. IV, a handful of Whippets, a smatering of Carden Loyd tankettes, and a trio of Medium Cs. But the Imperial Japanese Army realized that the only way to gain the expertise to make their own armored vehicles was to engage in a transitional stage of buying foreign tanks and modifying them with Japanese indigenous equipment.

This is how the Ko Gata Sensha (First Model of Tank) came to be. In the year 1919, 13 FT 17 tanks were obtained from France and in 1921, a Single Fiat 3000 from Italy. These were eventually modified with Japanese treads, gasoline engines, and weapons including the Taisho 3 machine gun and Sogekiho Infantry Gun. This experience of modifying tanks was instrumental in reaching the point of developing their first tank a decade later.

Unlike past issues of Big BangBig Bang Ricochet, the silver-covered books will provide everything necessary to allow you to drop the vehicle straight into your game. No more hunting for other issues covering weapon entries included in previous issues. please be aware this all-inclusive nature means that these silver edition booklets may occasionally duplicate material that has appeared in previous products.

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.